Baylor University’s mission is “to educate men and women for worldwide leadership and service by integrating academic excellence and Christian commitment within a caring community.” The University’s current strategic plan, “Baylor in Deeds,” strives to deepen this commitment to preparing our students for civic engagement through academic and character formation and expands our longstanding motto, Pro Ecclesia, Pro Texana, with an additional, broader global focus — Pro Mundo. “Baylor in Deeds” is inspired by Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, where he instructs us, “let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). Among the foundational pillars of this strategic plan is providing students with a “transformational undergraduate educational experience” including experiential learning opportunities outside the classroom.
Baylor’s Office of Engaged Learning (OEL) is a campus hub that connects students to these opportunities for engagement beyond the classroom including research, internships, and public service work in local, state and national communities, endeavoring to embody Paul’s exhortation in the First Epistle to Timothy, “to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share…so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life” (I Timothy 6:18-19). Through these learning experiences, the OEL equips students to “transform the cultural, social, economic, and political contexts around them so that they might help to create a world that is more just, fair, inclusive, equitable, and sustainable — one in which all flourishing is mutual.” We achieve our goals when our students orient their learning toward the needs of others, participating in civic engagement not for self-interested reasons such as bolstering their resumes but in service of the greater good.
We achieve our goals when our students orient their learning toward the needs of others, participating in civic engagement not for self-interested reasons such as bolstering their resumes but in service of the greater good.
One of OEL’s more recent initiatives is working alongside academic departments across campus to build the Engaged Learning Distribution List (ELDL) for Baylor’s College of Arts & Science’s Core Curriculum. While the requirement is only in its second year, the EL DL already boasts approximately 50 unique undergraduate courses from more than 20 distinct departmental prefixes, including disciplines spanning Arts and Sciences divisions as well as offerings from other colleges. Moreover, over 75% of these courses are either newly developed or revised for this requirement, underscoring widely shared enthusiasm for this work that will continue to blossom through “Baylor in Deeds.”
The College’s learning objectives for the ELDL include an explicit commitment to civic engagement: “Students will use knowledge gained and skills developed in the course to cultivate civic virtues and contribute to the public good.” Among the courses currently offered in the ELDL, those in the Philanthropy and Public Service Program (PPS) enroll the most total students, including PPS 1101 Learning for the World and PPS 2101 Community Based Global Learning. Each of these courses requires between ten and twenty hours of community-engaged service during the semester, with most students in PPS 1101 and PPS 2101 volunteering with English as a Second Language (ESL) programs offered at a local church and community college. Data from the Global Engagement Survey (GES) for courses offered in the 2024-2025 academic year is encouraging and indicates that students show improvement in both civic efficacy and global civic responsibility between the pre-test administered at the start of the semester and the post-test administered at the end of the class. These results bear witness to the positive impact that community engaged learning has in our quest to train students for “worldwide leadership and service” grounded in our Christian commitment to love our neighbor as ourselves.
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Editorial
From the Publisher & Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes, Lamont Anthony Wells
6 min audio
Wells and Windham-Hughes frame vocation as “ground game” — the practical, public living-out of faith through civic engagement — and introduce the issue’s focus on how Lutheran higher education equips students to repair the world.
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Reflection
I am a Treaty Partner
Kyrie Fairbairn
7 min audio
A recent California Lutheran graduate reflects on how a course on Indigenous Rights and Practices, and a conversation with a former Chairman of the Lummi Nation, led her to claim a “treaty partner” identity and to challenge readers to learn the treaties that shape the lands they call home.
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Article
Civic Engagement and Faith Perspectives
William O'Brochta
15 min audio
Guest editor William O’Brochta introduces the section by overviewing the ELCA’s call to civic engagement, recapping the Fall 2025 Civic Engagement and Faith Perspectives conference at Texas Lutheran University, and previewing the participant essays that follow.
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Article
Leaning-In to the Civic Lessons of Our Namesakes
A. Lanethea Mathews-Schultz
6 min audio
Mathews-Schultz uses the civic legacy of the Muhlenberg family — from General Pete’s Revolutionary call to action to President Muhlenberg’s inaugural address on the “education of conscience” — to invite students at Muhlenberg College into a shared civic inheritance.
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Article
Teaching and Mentoring in Service of Civic Engagement
Haco Hoang
6 min audio
Hoang describes how her teaching, mentoring, and research at California Lutheran University — including a multi-year collaboration with the Lutheran Office of Public Policy on Lutheran Lobby Day — cultivate civic skills grounded in ELCA social statements and the Lutheran tradition of faith and reason.
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Article
Community-Based Research as Engaged Citizenship
James Paul Old
6 min audio
Old argues that genuine citizenship requires more than charitable gestures — it demands long-term, reciprocal community partnerships — and describes how Valparaiso’s Community Research and Service Center embodies that vision even amid the financial pressures threatening such programs.
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Article
An Ecosystem of Democracy
David Thomason
6 min audio
Thomason argues that faith-based institutions should equip students not to dominate the public sphere with their convictions but to cultivate an “ecosystem of democracy” — pursuing universal values with virtue and tolerance while acknowledging humanity’s incomplete grasp of truth.
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Article
Bringing Core Values to Life through Civic Engagement
Austin Trantham
5 min audio
Trantham shows how Saint Leo University’s Benedictine Core Values shape his civic engagement work — from advising a “Why Vote?” campaign and Constitution Day panels to engaging students in the Unify Challenge for respectful cross-institutional discourse.
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Article
Fragmented in Faith: The Concerns and Hopes Found in Student Spirituality and Civic Engagement
Emma Bohmann, Monica Sitachitta
11 min audio
Two Texas Lutheran University students reflect on the cyclical pattern of low spiritual and civic engagement on their campus and argue that distinguishing Lutheran values from Lutheran practice could open space for civic engagement to become a non-optional expression of neighbor-justice for all students.
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Article
Views on Flourishing After the Age of Roe
Caryn Riswold, Mary J. Streufert
No. 57 · Spring 2023
Riswold and Streufert reflect on the Radcliffe Institute’s January 2023 conference “The Age of Roe” and argue that the ELCA’s 1991 Social Statement on Abortion and its 2019 statement Faith, Sexism, and Justice offer Lutheran higher education a third way to approach reproductive justice grounded in serving the neighbor so that all may flourish.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 9 · Summer 2000
Selbyg reports on the “Reclaiming Lutheran Students” research by the Lutheran Education Conference of North America (partly funded by the Aid Association for Lutherans), which found that alumni of Lutheran colleges report higher satisfaction with the overall quality of their education than alumni of flagship public universities, with more than eighty percent affirming that their college helped them develop moral principles and benefit from spiritual development, while also noting that parents of Lutheran high school students remain largely unaware of both the magnitude of financial aid offered and the quality of the education provided.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 17 · Summer 2003
Selbyg explains that the four essays in this issue grew out of the first Lutheran Academy of Scholars in Higher Education—a two-week seminar funded by the Lutheran Brotherhood Foundation and the Lilly Endowment, led for its first three years by Dr. Ronald Thiemann of Harvard Divinity School—whose official theme “Finding Our Voice—Christian Faith and Critical Vision” became informally “What’s Faith Got To Do With It?”
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Article
Where Disruption and Vocation Meet: One Path Toward Teaching Reproductive Justice in Challenging Times
Lena R. Hann
No. 57 · Spring 2023
Hann recounts how a missed math class in her first college term led her into volunteer work at a feminist abortion clinic and ultimately a career in public health, and describes how she designed and taught a Reproductive Justice immersive term course at Augustana College through the disruptions of COVID-19, George Floyd’s murder, and the Dobbs decision.
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Response
Response to Robert Benne
Baird Tipson
No. 17 · Summer 2003
Tipson responds to Robert Benne’s comments in the previous issue about his review essay of The Future of Religious Colleges, affirming their fundamental agreement that the Enlightenment epistemology dominant in higher education poses the most serious threat to the vitality of Lutheran colleges. Using the example of lecturing on early Mormon history and the Book of Mormon, he concedes that the methodological “solvent” of Enlightenment historiography acts on Christian as well as Mormon faith claims, and concludes that while H. Richard Niebuhr’s “inner” and “outer” history and Walter Brueggemann’s approach in The Theology of the Old Testament are comforting to believers, they do not offer an epistemology that can stand alongside the Enlightenment model in evaluating truth claims in the academy.
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Article
What Does Ethical Leadership in a Changing World Require?
Kristina Frugé
No. 62 · Fall 2025
5 min audio
Frugé argues that ethical leadership in a changing — perhaps ending — world means cultivating trustworthy communities through patient, co-created relationship work, drawing on her experience stewarding the writing community behind Hungry for Hope: Letters to the Church from Young Adults.